SharePoint powers teamwork in Office 365 – to better collaborate on proposals, projects, and campaigns throughout your organization. SharePoint has the power to meet the widest range of content collaboration needs including teamwork with Microsoft Teams and SharePoint pages. All up, this delivers a unique teamwork solution connecting content AND communications.

At work, it is important for every team member to streamline efforts and stay on the same page. Connected SharePoint team sites provide a central location to manage team files, input and connect to important data, and share timely news. And with insight into what drives the most engagement and value, people can course correct and optimize for greatest impact.

“Today, we have an enterprise data management solution that adheres to our document classification and retention policies using Microsoft SharePoint Online. This is huge from a compliance perspective for Cummins."

- Josh Littrell, Director of Corporate IT - Cummins

We’re excited to share this with you for the first time and look forward to working with you as a trusted partner to achieve your desired outcomes. Let’s dive into the details of what was disclosed…

Further SharePoint integration with Microsoft Teams

Already today, team members can highlight SharePoint files, lists, pages, news, and more – right inside of the Microsoft Teams user experience. When you share and work together, you need the tools and digital workspaces to communicate, access data, and stay productive. With employer expectations changing, employees are expected to be creative and to think critically.

SharePoint and Microsoft Teams integration provides a rich content collaboration and communication hub for teamwork, in context of where people work together and get work done.

Create a Team connected to your group-connected SharePoint team site - If your group-connected team site is not connected to a chat-based hub for teamwork, then it’s just one click away with the new Create a Team button in bottom-left corner of your site.

Create a Microsoft Team for your Office 365 Group from within your SharePoint team site.

Document library folders in sites visibly connected to Teams channel – Now it’s easy to tell which folders within your library have an associated Teams channel. That means the chat capability associated to it is visible and actionable right from within the SharePoint user interface. SharePoint also helps users understand that some actions, like delete or rename of a channel-connected folder, need to happen through the Teams app.

When a group-connected SharePoint team site is connected to Microsoft Teams, you will see a "Go to channel conversations" button indicating that the folder is connected to a Teams channel.

SharePoint web parts as tabs in Teams – We’re working towards directly exposing SharePoint web parts as tabs in Microsoft Teams - including their configuration options. Now, your custom development can be used in more places throughout your organizations collaboration and communication efforts.

Teams connectors as SharePoint web parts for pages and news – We’re working towards directly exposing Teams tabs as full-page apps in SharePoint - including their configuration options. Now your SharePoint sites can take full advantage of the rich ecosystem of service providers who are building integration with Microsoft Teams.

SharePoint is deeply integrated with Microsoft Teams in Office 365. Use SharePoint team sites to manage content and share it with your team members via their hub for teamwork - Microsoft Teams. Create a group-connected site today and start sharing.

Enhancements to powerful SharePoint web parts and pages

SharePoint pages let you tell a compelling story. And web parts play the role of dynamic components on the page to pull in data, documents, images and such. Together, you shape the content and context of how you communicate throughout your organization. And now it’s time to provide you with greater flexibility and control for how your data reacts, interacts and displays.

Webpart-to-webpart connections – Let web parts talk to other web parts and your pages and experiences become more dynamic with data and interactive. You will be able to configure web parts to get their property values from other web parts, including updating those values based on what is selected.

Initially we will support dynamic data in a few of our 1st-party webparts, with the intent to grow these capabilities through the SharePoint Framework - more and more web parts (talking to other web parts).

List (data provider)

List properties (consumer)

File viewer (consumer)

Embed (consumer)

Connect webparts to each other to create interactivity on your pages and news. In the above example, when the "Ad slogans" Word document is selected in the Document Library webpart, it then displays in the Files web part using Word Online.

New page title region options – As you begin to create the look and feel of your page, you now have more control over what the title region of your page looks like. You can choose from several layout options, alignment of where the overlay text resides, add text labels, show published date and author and provide alternative text to enhance the accessibility of your page.

The title region of a SharePoint page can now be displayed in various layouts.

Page section background shading - Create additional visual design and clarity as a user scrolls through your content. Now you can add different colors to the background of your page sections or leave them white as they are by default.

Make your pages and news easier to consume by using distinct shading of individual sections.

Page designs to reuse and standardize content - Save your creators time when they generate new SharePoint pages, and ensure that the consistency of experience for how you promote your content and information remains intact. You can control the design and layout of your pages by simply designing one that can then be used by many.

After laying out your page in a preferred design, you can click Promote and save it as a page design to speed up future page creation times that benefit from the same design and layout.

Team activity innovations and site governance

Heat map - insights on site activity shows site traffic patterns – Discover when people most often visit your site, so you can best target and reach people for important announcements and events.

Discover the most active times that people visit your site with the heat map found on the Site usage page.

Site classification shows policy labels – We are updating the user experience for classifying a site to integrate with Microsoft Info Protection policy labels. Group classification is no longer an arbitrary string (like HBI or MBI) but an actual IP policy with rules around retention, conditional access, etc. – using the names of how you uniquely classify your content – like “for everyone” or “legal only” or “Shhhh” (if you want to keep things ‘top secret’ ;); they're your policies – name them.

Try more and more of what SharePoint offers, and let us know what you think

In all, we encourage you to build out and organize your intranet. Establish the sites you need and ensure your users can create the sites they need. Once established, associate them to hub sites to organize related sites and projects. As you progress year over year, keep creating and sharing dynamic, data-rich news articles.

If you didn’t catch Jeff Teper’s general session, “Content Collaboration in the Modern Workplace” at Ignite or live streamed, I encourage you to watch the session, soon available on-demand.

We want to empower you and every person on your team to achieve more. Let us know what you need next. We are always open to feedback via UserVoice and continued dialog in the SharePoint community in the Microsoft Tech Community —and we always have an eye on tweets to @SharePoint. Let us know.

—Mark Kashman, senior product manager for the SharePoint team

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Q: When is this all being released in Office 365?

A: The above blog marks the disclosure of numerous feature and capability announcements. Our goal is to release all the items to Targeted Release customers in Office 365 by the end of the first half of calendar year 2019. You can expect future blogs and admin message center posts to raise attention to specific change management dates per each item to designate initial availability roll out in Office 365, with refined information about timing and duration of roll out.

Holy cow! This is fantastic. Worth its weight in gold just blocking users from renaming channels and doing other things that will destroy links to Teams.

Love the links back to channel conversations. Any plans to link back directly to specific file conversations? Would love a conversation bubble that popped you right back into Teams to the conversation for a given file.

Hi @Beth Hall - hope you have a nice cushioned carpet to fall into. Something tells me you might be felled about twice a year if the SharePoint team has any say in it. Or maybe we simply need to co-invest in a new chair ;). - Mark.

I'm loving all this - but can you give us any update on the best approach to multilingual modern sites, or when the capability to do these will be coming. Many companies work internationally as you know and need to provision the same piece of content in two (or more languages).

Hi @Ed Hansberry - nice suggestion. We've certainly been tracking the intelligence that we gather in the Microsoft Graph - which will contain more and more through the various services - of which we're reviewing how we can highlight certain non-SharePoint activities and represent them in a meaningful, actionable way - like we do today for document and site-oriented changes (with the Site activity feed). We'd like to make this feed more aware of items and actions beyond the SharePoint updates. Thus, your suggestion would be just that - something of interest to the team - first for awareness, and then when someone wishes to engage, they could click into the conversation from the feed. We're in exploratory mode as of now, with recent on-boarding of Outlook 'team inbox' activity that we've shared as intent soon. SharePoint + MS Teams is a big focus, and your suggestion aligns well with what we wish to offer as tightening, maybe erasing, the seams of product - into the fabric of the service. Thanks, Mark.

Hi @Brad Leach. Let's make that our lil' secret - and noted. Thanks for calling it to attention. I think Contoso did put out a job requirements posting to hire more emplyees - it's a special position in their HR department that employ & ensure empathy emphatically - and it's such a new position, they were trying to be hip and take the "o" out to emphasize the inclusive nature of their new digital workplace. Are you buying it?

We'll keep the pace, and always aim for clarity. And keep letting us know your thoughts.

Hi @Trent Queen. You can. When in a Teams chat, click the paper clip icon (wish I could call this Clippy, but moving on in history shows I cannot ;)), and then click "Browse Teams and Channels" (aka, folders & document library in SharePoint) > select the desired file, and then click the "Share a link" button to add the doc as a link from SharePoint to the discussion. And when in the browse motion, you can click the "up" arrow to navigate to other site document libraries and folders.

Hi @Sam Foster. We've listed this as a top of mind item to resolve in 2019. We've a few design ideas, and in the interim have numerous partners (PointFire, Powell 365, Valo to name a few) that have solved this already within their solutions. Our recommendation is to review what they offer, and know that we're working on it - with their awareness - as a larger item to offer directly from our service.

Our first motion is to make it easier to deem the preferred language for the SharePoint chrome, and working on what to do with your unique content/text. Also note that we've announced multi-geo support for where data can reside by choice for already OneDrive now, and coming support for SharePoint in Office 365.

Hi Andre @ NL Salomons - as of now, no - the text would appear as you see it with "..." when too long. I'm adding @Miceile Barrett to this comment so she can take a look at what you mean and consider 'wrap text' for future updates to the List and Document Library webpart - or any that showcase SharePoint columns... Thanks, Mark.

Hi @Oliver Huang - I'll make sure the feedback lands in the right hands as the team plans for future innovation in the navigation elements - some of what we showed and shared at Ignite, some we've not yet shown... :-). More to come for sure in this space. - Mark.

Hi everyone. I am a huge fan of these new features! Roadmaps are great and i love the transparancy but to be completely honest, it is quite frustrating knowing these things exist but have no idea when they will actually be deployed in general but to our specific tenant.

@Mark Kashman in future articles please be more careful with the tense that you use in announcements like this. When you state that "Now it’s easy to tell which folders within your library have an associated Teams channel" I am expecting to be able to actually do this, but in reality, it has been 9 months and the O365 Message Center is just now informing us that this functionality is starting to roll-out and it will still take up to 2 more months before we get this.

I understand that you want to tell us what's coming but wording like this is very misleading and does not help us to set expectations with customers. This specific feature has been highly anticipated and the fact that we have not had this functionality has caused numerous problem with many users. The engineering team really needs to get focused on finishing important features like this before starting new ones.